Labs to Jobs Consortium Includes SUNY Oswego Biomedical Labs

April 15, 2016

The new SUNY Labs to Jobs Consortium will establish a “Smart Health” Biomedical and Health Informatics Research Lab and a Biomedical Instrumentation Teaching Lab for SUNY Oswego as well as provide additional equipment for the college’s Advanced Wireless Systems Research Center.

The five-campus consortium, supported by $18 million from the fourth round of the NY SUNY 2020 Challenge Grant program, is led by Onondaga Community College and includes SUNY Oswego, Upstate Medical University, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and Morrisville State College.

Together they will share seven advanced labs located across the region. The labs will provide students with spaces that simulate various workplaces and house workforce development training in fields such as medicine, engineering and business. The initiative builds on existing partnerships among these institutions that started as a result of round two NY SUNY 2020 funding, which established the Institute for Environmental Health and Environmental Medicine.

“We are finding that the capacity for innovation when our institutions’ professors and researchers join forces is just astounding,” said SUNY Oswego President Deborah F. Stanley. “In the Labs to Jobs Consortium, we will be working together and with business partners to lift the health and vitality of our region.”

New SUNY Oswego Facilities

SUNY Oswego’s campuses in Oswego and Syracuse will have two of the consortium’s new labs, costing just over $2 million. The $1.42 million research lab will be in the SUNY Oswego Metro Center in Syracuse. The $230,000 teaching lab will be in the college’s electrical and computer engineering department in the Shineman Center for Science, Engineering and Innovation on the college’s main campus in Oswego. The Oswego campus is also home to the wireless research center, which will receive $360,000 in new equipment.

The labs and new state-of-the-art equipment are expected to be fully operational by the fall 2016 semester.

The research lab will support the college’s forthcoming master’s degree in biomedical and health informatics. It will feature advanced and innovative technology in a suite of professional stations, including one for telehealth to distantly interact with patients in the clinic and the home, one for the “intelligent hospital” with patient monitoring and alert systems that integrate patient data from different devices and hospital units, and a demo space for such sophisticated technology as wearable and mobile health devices and health-related robotics.

The Biomedical Instrumentation Teaching Lab will feature 12 workstations, at which students can work in groups of two, learning electrical engineering fundamentals and applying those skills to the operation, design and construction of biomedical instruments.

For example, a device developer could test a wearable sensor that monitors the physiological and biochemical conditions of the human body and wirelessly transmits data to both nearby and remote sites.

The funds for the wireless research center will upgrade its existing facilities to accommodate the 5G mobile network and provide additional wireless sensor and signal processing measurement equipment.